Miami News Blog

Gus Garcia-Roberts

​It's not just artists in the cubed-cheese-and-champagne-set who are making frenzied preparations for Art Basel. New Times' favorite graffiti crew, MSG, promises that it has scads of plans- both legal and illegal- to coincide with the arrival of the massive convention. For starters, thirteen artists teamed up to paint a too-massive-for-our-camera zombie-themed mural along the outside wall of the Roy Kelley gallery on Northeast 29th Street in Wynwood. On Tuesday afternoon, they put the finishing touches on the piece, which was inspired by a poster for the movie "Zombieland".

Why the subject matter? "Art Basel attracts zombies to Miami," explains writer Quake. "They descend on the city like 'Buy, buy buy.'"

Riptide took a few photos of the work in progress last week, and the finished product on Tuesday:

Before.

​South Florida's elite graffiti crew MSG might have lost one of its most prolific taggers, as reported here last week, but it looks like the remaining artistes are picking up the slack. And while Riptide, for legal reasons, remains firmly against vandalizing other people's property, this still wins our heart as the best defacement we've seen in a long time. As touted on his crew's own website, MSGCartel.com, local graffiti legend Crome recently performed a big-schnoz customization of Miami's creepiest landmark: the Don Bailey Carpets advertisement along I-95 displaying the business's pale namesake in a nude recline.

MSGCartel.com

After.

We called the carpet king Bailey himself for his take on the graffiti -- but first, for our own edification, some sort of explanation of the advertisement that's put us off our croissant on many a morning commute.

Fans of obscure beefcake know his nude pose was once topical: When he first had it painted 38 years ago, Bailey was inspired by Burt Reynolds' April 1972 Cosmopolitan spread in which the Smokey and the Bandit star forever tainted a bearskin rug. At that time, Bailey says, he had just recently quit a janitorial job to invest $5,000 in savings into his start-up carpet business in a warehouse on the then-desolate block of 8300 Biscayne Boulevard. "I saw how Reynolds got so much publicity when he was the first man to ever pose nude in a major magazine," recalls the old-school entrepreneur. "I immediately told an artist to paint me a 20 [foot]-by-40 [foot] mural of me in the same pose. Business was slow, with maybe two women a day coming in to look at carpet. The day after the mural went up, we started getting 15 to 25 people a day."

Photo by Luca Lucarini

Max Rameau

Remember the squatters? Last winter, there was a media fest in Miami about homeless families taking over abandoned, foreclosed homes. After New Times broke the story, broadcasts from CNN to NPR followed. The tale had an apocalyptic, end-of-days vibe to it. South Florida's real estate bust was so bad it felt like the next step would be Herbert Hoover-style shacks in Central Park.

Things are looking better now, but the squatter movement is stronger than ever. And one documentarian has journeyed from Canada to turn Miami's economic weirdness into a powerful narrative.

Luca Lucarini is a soft-spoken filmmaker who works with RomanRain Films productions. He squatted in houses in London years ago and once worked on a film called Steal This Film. He's now filming "vignettes to illustrate the craziness" in Miami and has spent weeks following around Max Rameau, the passionate director of Take Back the Land. Luca is also focusing on a squatter named Mary Trody. She's a mother of 12 who was evicted from her home. Other homeless folks have occupied foreclosed abodes in Liberty City and Brownsville.

So far, media has oversimplified Mary's story. Says Luca: "[Coverage] makes her look like a victim. It's always, 'Look at this poor lady -- it's so sad.' But actually she's taking control of her life."

Miami is the perfect place to tell the story, Luca says. The city's scenery is cinematic and offers the most dramatic glimpse into the real estate bust. "It's a special case. Miami is big in terms of showing the rise and fall of the industry... It's not a coincidence this is happening here."

JamesandKarlaMurray.com

Crome did the magician with the fish balloon. Cycle did the rest.

​This is just freakin' awesome. James and Karla Murray, the photographers behind Miami Graffiti, the book showcasing our finest street artists, have inspired a nostalgic acid trip of an art installation featuring local graff legend Crome.

For an exhibition still in the works called "MOM & POPism," artist Billi Kid has made huge blowups of photos from the Murrays' book on erstwhile mom-and-pop storefronts in New York. Then he's plastered them on miniature buildings atop the Gawker Media building in Manhattan for graffiti artists to decorate. Among those spray-can impresarios invited: Crome of infamous Miami graffiti duo Crook and Crome and capo of the MSG Cartel, those personas non grata in Hollywood. 

Now we're wondering: Can we get something like this in Miami? God knows we've lost some beloved and unique business storefronts to make room for soulless developments. It's been gone for only a year, but who isn't nostalgic for the ugly yellow façade of the Pawn Shop Lounge? After the jump, a few more photos. For more, visit the photographers' website.

via GraffHead.com

​Miami graffiti artists seem to be having a moment, thanks in part to Jim and Karla Murray's Miami Graffiti tome (see pictures here). That led to an exhibition at the Mid-City Arts Gallery in Los Angeles earlier this month. Of course, you can't invite a bunch of graffiti artists out to L.A. and expect them to be content with leaving their mark solely on the aesthetic sensibilities of gallery-goers.

Crews and artists including MSG Cartel (which apparently still evades clueless Broward cops), Ikonz, and TCP all took the opportunity to make L.A.'s walls their canvas.

The above image is an MSG piece in Venice, from GraffHead.com. You can see more shots there.

Having no health insurance sucks. Just ask Cecil Gamarra. Three years ago, the soft-spoken 42-year-old noticed his young Haitian wife beginning to change. She stopped sleeping and would vanish for days at a time. Sometimes she'd mutter things about people who didn't exist -- and places she'd never visited. 

In March, we reported on the release of Miami Graffiti, a photography book by New York husband-and-wife duo James and Karla Murray that captures the unique culture and handiwork of some of our finest street artists. Tommorow, the work of those same graff artists- and the photographers- will be honored in a fancy-schmancy opening at a Los Angeles Art gallery. It kind of tickles us to think of affluent art-collector types washing cubed cheese down with pinot grigio as they study photos of the "vandalism" our politicians have vowed to eradicate. Check out the promotional video above, which interestingly eschews much footage of murals and instead shows some cool shots of real Miami.

This year, we bequeathed our first-annual "Best Barely Legal Art Blog" to graffiti "online exhibition" MSGCartel.com. We wrote:

Browse the site -- named for graffiti crew Miami Style Gods -- for a while and it becomes clear it's operated by, and is a meeting ground for, Miami's most prolific illegal artists, from Crome and Crook to Atomik. The photos posted constitute a de facto hall of fame for some of the most skilled local wall work... It's a daily updated finger on the pulse of a naturally reclusive subculture.

I guess we should've expected this: MSG has immortalized the award on a local wall, which makes us feel proud... and strangely nervous. Does this make us an accessory?

All photos courtesy MSGCartel.com

Hollywood cops and politicians are hot on the trail of a "bold graffiti master" defacing their city's walls, or they might be -- once they figure out they're actually after not one guy but a crew.

Yep, yesterday the overall feeling of security among South Florida's graffiti writers improved an estimated 12 percent when the Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald published stories revealing cops are one Google search away from figuring out how many perps there are.

Good ol' Hollywood city Commissioner Beam Furr said this about a highly skilled mystery tagger:

"It looks like the same signature," said Furr, who initiated an impromptu anti-graffiti discussion during Wednesday's regular city meeting. "He's gotta be proud of his stuff and showing it off to others. Someone has to know who it is and hopefully turn him in.''

While neither story identified the signature, the Sun-Sentinel's version included a photo of one of the offending murals, which clearly reads "MSG Cartel," the tag for one of Miami's most prolific graffiti crews. It's not like we're passing on sensitive information here: MSG has its own website, for chrissakes, where the crew is laughing at its one-baby-step-at-a-time pursuers.

James & Karla Murray

A few months ago, New Times editor Chuck Strouse admired Buk Fifty's work above I-95. However, some people didn't think it wasn't as cool as Strouse made it out to seem. Personally, I take more a middle-of-the-road approach. Though defacing signs on I-95 ends up costing the taxpayers money to clean up, there is no denying neighborhoods such as Wynwood have greatly benifited from street artists and their work, legal or not. Instead of sun-bleached walls, the area features countless colorful murals that add to its vibrancy.

Photographers James and Karla Murray have captured Miami's graffiti scene and artists in a newly released book titled Miami Graffiti. In it, they've gorgeously documented vivid murals created by locals. Check out some photo excerpts from the book here, and if you want to meet the photographers, they will be a Buck 15 Wednesday night to celebrate its release.

Local graffiti artists have been getting a lot of attention lately. In February, they pierced the mainstream media by targeting some uber-audacious locations, eventually culminating in a fatal accident. And in April, a photography book, Miami Graffiti, pays tribute to some of the street's most skilled artists.

Husband and wife photographers James and Karla Murray are professional graffiti aficionados, having already written a couple of volumes about elaborate street art in their native New York. They were turned onto the medium when a graffiti artist there recruited them to put together a portfolio of his work. "It became an obsession for us once we started finding these beautiful murals," Karla says. "It was clear somebody spent long, long amounts of time on these paintings. And our reaction was, 'How could all this -- these intricate designs with colors that grab you -- be done with spray paint?' Then we started meeting the artists and getting into the graffiti culture."

When corporate assignments took them to Miami, they used their first free moments to scour the city in a rented car, looking to experience a new city's spray-paint style. They found a scene that was relatively new but just as vibrant as New York's -- and reflected Miami's gaudy general motif. 

"The graffiti artists in Miami use these tropical colors," Karla explains. "In New York, they tend to paint with darker colors -- grays, dark greens -- reflecting the urban environment. In Miami, you'll see candy colors: bright pinks, bright green. When we started meeting Miami artists, we asked them: 'Do you guys purposely use these bright colors?' And they really didn't even realize they were doing it. One of them was like, 'That's partly just what we see in Miami.' Everything's brightly colored there, even the cars. In NY, you'll never see a neon bright green car. You'll see them all over the place in Miami."

Then there's that other difference between the two scenes: in New York, pained knuckles and frozen paint cans force graf artists to take winters off. No such hiatus exists in Miami, which makes the Murrays' task of stalking new pieces more challenging. "New York's winter is good for us, because it gives us a chance to catch up," Karla says. "But that's the exciting nature of photographing graffiti -- you can't be lazy about it. When you see a beautiful piece, you can't wait until tomorrow to shoot it. The city, or other artists, might paint over it. The hunt sometimes has us busting into abandoned buildings to shoot the piece on the building across from it, climbing trees to get a good shot -- we've had to do some crazy things."

Stay tuned for info on some interesting book-release events the Murrays are planning. In the meantime, here are a few of the photos that will make the cut:

Things have gotten a little crazy in the Miami graffiti scene as of late. First, spray-paint crew Buk 50 made the news when its giant tag obscured an overhead I-95 sign during Presidents' Day weekend. The uber-ballsy stunt earned a nod from our boss, and a stodgy rebuke from our more solemn peers over at the Herald's editorial department, who took the revolutionary stance that "graffiti writers should be caught and punished." Our favorite line from the editorial: "The group has been identified by graffiti insiders as Buk 50."

That's an impressive source you got there, Herald.

That Wednesday night/Thursday morning, bombers struck again, marking a US-1 street sign between Coral Gables and downtown with the tag "Edge," repping the graffiti crews Buk 50, MSG, and 28. The artist(s) clearly knew the media would cover the vandalism again, adding the scrawled boast of "America's Most Wanted," and they were right.

The next morning, the reckless sign-painting trend went from entertaining to tragic when a Kendall graffiti artist, Enrique "Kiki" OIivera, who tagged "Merk," fell to his death on the Palmetto Expressway. A statement released by his family lamented that "this isolated incident was out of Enrique's character."

Hmmm, not so much. In the wake of his death, graffiti connoisseurs have busied themselves posting photos of his work. Check out memorial posts at MSG Cartel, The 305, and Miamigraffiti.com.

In a second entry of the handwritten autobiography he recently wrote in jail, Overtown hustler Big Red talks about an unusual robbery for which he received six years in state prison. He leaves out names and some important details, but offers a peek at a different side of Miami street crime. He writes:

Outrageous. I been a pimp, a hit man and a dealer. And for all the wrong I've done, they put me in the pen for stealing a pack of pork chops.

When the cops drove by, I heard the sirens and I had to hide them chops. I threw them on to of the roof of the store and ran. I fell and the cop caught up to me. He said, "Well, homeboy, good thing you are tired of runnin'. I would have shot you." He was in a thick leather police coat.

Hell, I'll say this: He didn't throw me on the ground and rough me up. He figured they would get me down at the station. But I look down and I see my leg bleeding. Must have cut myself falling. Then I see two ambulances coming down the street and they wave to us. I assume the po po want a nice clean case, so better to have me check out. So they sent me to the hospital.

I am in the emergency room and I see me on TV! The pork chop bandit. News people say I was facing one count of robbery and three counts of felonious assault. The doc checks me out. Don't need no stitches. Damn if it ain't the same doctor who seen me a few weeks ago when I got hit with a hammer. Interns got a kick out of looking at the hole in my head. "That should be plenty of painkiller; you've been drinking," he said. (In an Indian accent.) "Good thing you have thick bones. Another inch, you would have needed a stretcher."
(More after jump.)

Usually, if a guy calls himself a pimp, he's using a frat boy Urban Dictionary term for how he's, like, totally good with the ladies. But when Big Red drops those four letters, he's talking about the ten-plus years he has spent soliciting females' bodies for money on the street. This past summer, New Times wrote a profile about this oddly charismatic -- but unflinchingly ruthless -- Overtown hustler. A homeless entrepreneur of the ghetto, the wooly-chested, perpetually shirtless alpha male carried a machete-size knife, sold clean needles for three dollars each, and told stories about his days as a hit man in Miami. He also swore his criminal days were over.

Then last week, we got a call from him. "It's Red. Just got out of jail again. Wrote a book while I was on the inside," he said, handing the phone to one of his "hos." She filled us in on the rest of the details. (Records show he was arrested for assualt and battery earlier this month.)

The next day, he came to the office to drop off an encyclopedia-thick autobiography he wrote in ballpoint pen. On the front page, in pencil, he scrawled the title: Lawless to Legit. The  sometimes offensive, pretty much coherent writings offer a glimpse into Miami street crime through the eyes of the criminal. This week, we'll share a few of Red's entries, beginning with his early days.

(Read an excerpt after jump.)

The "Pedestriart" urban art project has taken over the Midtown Art Park. Apparently it's important for everyone to know that grasshopper 69s are strictly prohibited. Local artist Leonel Matheu uses his own icons to make signs for bikers, dogwalkers, and picnic eaters. Several big art fairs including, SCOPE and PhotoMiami are setting up tents just a couple blocks south of the park, so it should get plenty of foot traffic. Here are some shots of the work:

Two blocks east of Biscayne Boulevard between NE 23rd and 35th Streets along the seawall separating Biscayne Bay from Miami's asphalt landscape, lie many forms of public art. The following images depict examples of scratching, tagging, drawing, bombing, stickering, propaganda, architecture, nature and industrial design. Words are stupid. Here are the pictures.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny painted on a wall in Miami's Wynwood Arts District. Jack Nicholson, aka Jack Torrance, in The Shining appears with an assortment of other killers, psychos and sociopaths from recent film history.

The I.D. Art Gallery building on the west edge of Wynwood is canvassed all across its exterior. The east facing wall of the building forms an alley with the building next door and is bombed with an MSG (Miami Style Graffiti) Day of the Dead production. The 10 a.m. sun formed a shadow against the bottom half of the wall so some of the pictures didn't turn out so well.

StreetWorks is usually a graffiti blog. Starting today, as long as I'm shooting, it'll document all forms of publicly displayed art, from the gutter to the gallery.

With that in mind, this week's feature is the Gary Nader Sculpture Park featuring bronze work by Fernando Botero. The sculptures are lined up in the parking lot of the Gary Nader Fine Art gallery in Miami's Wynwood Art District.

Cuban rapper Pitbull's Mun2 show La Esquina is always interesting. To prove his point about the reality of Cuban immigration, Pitbull wagers that two of his costars couldn't even survive in inner tubes in the local pool for a few hours.

To confront hip-hop culture's attitude towards homosexuality, the rapper's co-star, Fademaster, makes a homophobic friend take on a gay man in the boxing ring.

It's a format that doesn't need tinkering with. But the show's opening is getting a whole new look for its second season. Artists Not Criminals, a graffiti company, is painting a mural on the side of the show's eponymous main setting, Fademaster's La Esquina barbershop on Calle Ocho. The new opening will be a stop motion sequence of the mural's creation.

Across the Rickenbacker Causeway from our gutter metropolis, between the City of Miami and the Village of Key Biscayne, lies Virginia Key. It's home to the legendary Jimbo's, a one of a kind smoked fish and beer shack replete with bocce ball, feral cocks and spray can art.

On 27th Street, between North Miami Avenue and NE 2nd Avenue, in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, a set of railroad tracks faces the completely bombed wall of the Miller Machinery and Supply Co. building.

So as some of you pointed out last week, the mural I photographed on NE 14th Street was nothing more than a paid advertisement by the Ford Motor Co. I revisited the mural today and you were right. Can't say I'm surprised. (Cue savvy PR talk). What better way to tap into the youth than communicating to them in a familiar way?

The "artwork" is trying hawk the new Ford Focus to a Hispanic audience, even pointing to the viewer to visit fordenespanol.com and instructing them to manejalo -- the Focus that is.

This has piqued my interest in graffiti work used for advertisement. Does anyone know of any other examples around the city that do this?

- Jose D. Duran

On my way to White Room Monday night, I spotted a man painting a mural along the corner of NE 14th Street and 1st Avenue. It is basically at the entrance of Overtown, right along the corridor were you can find PS14, Vagabond, Ice Palace and the recently boarded up Karu & Y.

It wasn't hard to see what the man was doing. It was 10:30 p.m. and he being aided by numerous spotlights. I left White Room at 11:30 and decided to rush back home to get my camera and grab a few snapshots of the man working, but on my way home I saw he had packed up and left. I returned Tuesday afternoon to get a glance of what he was working on and noticed it's still a work in progress. I guess I'll have to revisit it at the end of the month and see how it turns out.

- Jose D. Duran

When it seems like I've exhausted all of Wynwood, I stumble upon this mural along NW 6th Avenue. I slammed on my brakes and sat in my car for a minute thinking, "How the hell could I have missed this?" It was enormous, wrapping around a property that took up the entire block.

In the final installment of the graffiti I documented at the Margulies Collection in Wynwood, here is what the backside of the building looks like. Unprotected by a chain-link fence and barbwire, it's exposed, inviting graffiti artists to tag it.

A few weeks ago I received a e-mail from Miami photographer Kerry Ball, who specializes in photographing graffiti around the city. She pointed out a series of hearts that have been popping up all over town, particularly in the Downtown, Wynwood, Midtown and Overtown areas.

So when I woke up last week to find a subject to feature, this was originally what I had in mind. The mural, on the side of the warehouse that holds the Margulies Collection, is located on NW 6th Avenue between NW 27th and 28th Streets. Driving north on I-95, you can barely see the top half.

Waking up early this morning to realize I had nothing for this week's StreetWorks meant I had to drag myself out of bed to find something to talk about. I hopped into my car and drove, once again, in the general direction of Wynwood. It never fails me, but I knew if I was going to make this interesting it had to be something unusual or spectacular.

I opted for a safe bet, knowing that the side of the Margulies Collection had an impressive mural that one could barely see from I-95 along NW 6th Avenue. In trying to find parking as to not a) have my car obstruct the view of the mural, and b) not be in the way of the cars zooming along the surprisingly busy street, I turned at NW 28th Street and discovered the back of the building was also adorned with a mural that unfortunately had been disfigured thanks to other "artists" stopping by to add their own touches.